


The Alphabet of Natasha

by MyNightmaresAreMyDaydreams



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alphabet drabbles, BAMF Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Drabble Collection, Drakov's Daughter - Freeform, F/M, Has Actual Plot, Kid Natasha Romanov, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Origin Story, Protective Natasha Romanov, Red Room (Marvel), She is made of Marble and Steel, She will not break, These are the words that define her
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-05-02 12:56:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14545230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyNightmaresAreMyDaydreams/pseuds/MyNightmaresAreMyDaydreams
Summary: These are the words which make her up, the fragments of her life and who she was, who she is. These are the letters with which Natasha wrote her life. These are the things she uses to define herself, how she was made, how she broke free.A for Asset (the new one)B for Bullet (there was one for her)C for Child (she could never be one)D for Death (it always followed her)E for Enemy (she is told who they are) (Drakov's daughter)F for Family (she found one, it broke)G for Gamble & Game (it all was, once)





	1. A for Asset (the new one)

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Note: This is the first of a series of long drabbles based around Natasha. This one has plot, but it is limited. Be warned, it is dark. Not as dark as Natasha can get, but has mildly graphic descriptions of death and torture. If this might upset you, please don't read. This one is based around the word "Asset".
> 
> Could be considered AU, because it differs from Nat's official Red Room story, and her birthdate. I figured that if Bucky was captured before Nat, they were both assassins, and Bucky was kept in cyro, Nat probably was as well. And we know that HYDRA never gave up on a super soldier serum, either.
> 
> Natasha may seem cruel sometimes. She had no choice. She was made, but she broke her bonds and left. This particular story doesn't touch on how she left, just how she was made.
> 
> DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belong to me, I just have the privilege of playing with them. All rights go to Marvel.

To the team, Bucky was the Asset. He was the one that the Red Room corrupted, diseased, broke, changed, brainwashed.

And he was.

But so was she.

November 22, 1984.

That's what SHIELD had her birthdate as. But that's false. That was the last time she was pulled out of the cryogenic chamber.

She was born forty years or so earlier. They erased it from her memory, so she couldn't be sure.

Her and Bucky's stories were different.

Bucky had been captured as young man, and injected with a serum. They had tried to replicate Captain America, but it hadn't worked perfectly.

He was twenty-eight when HYDRA had captured him.

Natalia was five.

By the time they had her, they had perfected their memory-wiping devices, and improved the serum.

* * *

 

She was never sure whether she had ever been a ballerina before that, ever had parents, ever had a family, but she liked to believe she did. It made it easier to bear the memories of her training that they left her with. They could have wiped her memory, but they had decided to leave her training behind, remind her of what had happened to the others, and how much she belonged to them.

She remembered spinning across rooms, toes jammed into shoes too large for her, five-year-old body thin and strong. The floor was concrete, and she was clumsy. Dancing for hours did that to a young child. She remembered watching the sun rise, set, and rise again, all the time dancing. She remembered watching the pale colours of a Russian sunrise bleed across the horizon as the red from her abused feet bled across the floor. She remembered the fifty girls her age, stumbling, falling, collapsing, but she stayed strong. She was stone, pulling herself up when she felt like dropping. She watched as the first five to fall where dragged out of the room as the ache in her arms numbed. She remembered the five short, sharp, harsh (just like their short lives) gunshots that sounded outside soon after.

Five-year-old Natalia had sworn to never be them. She was stone, even then. She was the last to stop, falling into the rest position that had been painfully ingrained into her when the instructor called a halt. That was the first time she heard to word "asset".

"This one has potential," they had said. "She may be the new asset."

* * *

 

She remembered the people who the Red Room sent to look after them. They were all she knew as parents. She remembered one, the woman who unlocked the handcuffs that chained her to her bed every morning. She remembered how the woman had slipped her an extra slice of bread one morning, when Natalia couldn't keep herself from shivering, all skin and bones, the beginnings of muscles on her five-year-old frame. She remembered how, later that day, she watched as one of her instructors demonstrated on the woman, knives tearing long, red lines across her skin and Natalia's heart.

The kind woman died.

Natalia killed her; the final person in her class to wield the knife, the one who finally sliced a gash (perfectly placed, for she was a good student) across her throat.

She was stone, but she was breaking. So she became steel, feeling it pump through her veins. She could bend, twist, and almost fall, but they couldn't break her if she was steel.

The instructor watched Natalia's unflinching face as the woman died, and thought  _this is our new asset. This one, we have complete control over._

She remembered the girls who were her family. There were fifty with her when she woke up in the Red Room, that she knows.

Five fell as they danced, and never came back.

Ten died out in the wilderness a month later, a survival trek allowing only the strongest to survive. Back then, she hadn't even thought it was strange to have forty-five five and six year olds march, naked, through the freezing Russian winter. (Among those watching was a man with a metal arm, mind in agony from a brainwipe, only having the strength for one thought:  _This one will be a better Asset than I ever was_ )

* * *

 

There were thirty-five left when she turned six. She only knows this because they were moved in to a new room. The room had thirty-four beds.

They fought for them. Natasha laughed when she thought about it. It had been like a gruesome musical chairs, each girl rushing for a bed as soon as they were told to go.

Natalia was the girl left over, pushed aside. She was the smallest (but not the weakest. No, never the weakest).

An instructor was reaching for her arm when she darted away (she remembered the bang of the gun after the dancing girls had failed), jumping on one of the girls who had claimed a bed. She remembered the snap the girl's neck had made, heard it every time she slept.

She remembered there was an extra serving of food for her the next morning. She remembered six-year old Natalia looking around at the thirty-three other hungry girls, realizing that  _I must outlive them all. I must be stone, and I must be steel._

By the time she was eight, there where twenty girls left. Natalia had killed eleven of those who were no longer there.

* * *

 

She remembered the injections.

Natasha remembered being strapped into the metal chair, eight years old. She remembered one of the girls struggling. She remembered Natalia hearing the snap, knowing  _nineteen left._

She could still remember, eighty or so years later, the fire racing through her, trying to melt the steel she had infused herself with. But she was also stone, marble, marble that reinforced her bones and held her strong.

She lived.

Only ten did.

After that, she was stronger, braver, fiercer. She was enhanced.

She remembered the instructors whispering, " _Asset. This is our Asset. Our new Asset."_

* * *

 

As she watched the Winter Soldier in video feed, much, much older, and freer, she remembered her first mission. She had been thirteen.

Every one of the eight remaining girls had been sent out in to Berlin. They had five targets to eliminate and two hours in the whole city.

Natalia killed two of the targets. (Bang, bang, screams and blood, and staring eyes that never went away.)

Four girls were killed when they got back to the Red Room. They had failed to kill a target.

She remembered the mutters, mutters of "The new Asset, the strongest girl." The murmurs of "She killed two. She was lethal."

She remembered the targets of all of her missions after that. HYDRA removed her memories of her missions, but left the target name. They wanted her to know who she had killed, but nothing else.

* * *

 

She remembered how one of the three other girls had pulled a gun during a training session, shooting herself.

She remembered knowing that she could never go that way.

_Three girls left._

* * *

 

One died on a mission.

_Two girls left._

* * *

 

One failed a mission. Natalia hunted them down. Bang.

_She was left, and she was steel and marble and she would never break._

She was sixteen then. They sterilized her, and she graduated.

They called her the Asset, the Young Asset, the New Asset.

She knew what it meant. She was theirs.

* * *

 

Natalia went into cryogenic suspension for the first time a month after graduating. She saw a man with a metal arm being woken up as she lost all sense of reality.

The Winter Soldier saw her and he knew.  _She is the new Asset. She is the young Asset._

A minute later, all memories of her were erased.

* * *

 

Years later, she was a ruthless and cruel master assassin and spy. She earned herself a new title.

_The Black Widow._

Her bite was fatal, and her web was wide.

Her memory was wiped of all but her targets' names (they surfaced in her nightmares every time she dared to close her eyes) and her training, and she forgot the first Asset, and forgot that she was once the New Asset.

Decades later, Natasha saw the Winter Soldier. She saw his file, saw "The Asset" listed as one of his code names.

She remembered. She remembered an age of not-allowed-to-cry pain, and death that followed her, stored in her pockets, each of her bullets claiming a life. She remembered blood bleeding from ballet shoes and bullet holes; pirouetting girls and then BANG. She remembered hard days of training, nights handcuffed to beds, and the girls that didn't make it. Girls who had never had a life worth living. Girls who names and faces had been erased from her memories.

She remembered the time before the Black Widow.

She remembered the making of Natasha, and the girl who had called herself Natalia.

She remembered being the new Asset.


	2. B for Bullet (there was one for her)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is also kind of dark. Based around bullets, and the old myth that if a bullet had your name on it, it was heading for you and nothing could stop it. A variation of this was popular in the 1st and 2nd World Wars, where trench lore was that death had bullets for all of the soldiers, and if you were going to die it would be from that bullet.
> 
> DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belong to me, I just have the privilege of playing with them. All rights go to Marvel

It was a few months after Ultron before Natasha really caught a break. She's not exhausted; she's used to it, as SHIELD had even longer, harder hours. Still, it was nice to have a bit of time to herself, where she wasn't on a mission, and she wasn't helping to train the new Avengers.

She walked in to her apartment in the Avengers Complex.

Something felt wrong.

It was probably nothing, just Vision wandering through walls, knocking something over as he adjusted to his powers.

It probably was, but it didn't stop her from jumping when she saw it.

To anyone else, it would just be a hazard of the job.

To Natasha, it was more than that.

A bullet shell casing lay on the ground, a few centimetres from Tasha's kitchen table.

That was all it was. A brass bullet casing, two holes pierced through it on opposing sides.

Just a bullet shell, a hazard of the job.

But it wasn't.

Tasha bent down and picked it up. It had fallen off the shelves near the table, so she wasn't worried about an intruder.

Nat turned the brass in her fingertips, watching the light as it glanced off the metal. It was still there, blocky text that declared " _Natalia Alianovna Romanoff"._ Her birth name.

She knows these bullets, and she can't remember why she kept this one, until she can.

She's swept up in the stream of memories before she can make it to a chair. She slumps on the ground, soft carpet a welcome cushion.

* * *

 

The first time she saw a bullet like this, she was seven.

As part of the Red Room training, all of the girls had learnt how to use weapons. Guns were too heavy, too volatile, for a young girl, so in a rare moment of consideration the Red Room had left guns until the children were seven.

By the time she saw a bullet like this, Natalia was used to the feeling of the metal in her hands, used to the powerful recoil of a rifle, or the sharp bang of a pistol. She could load, aim and fire in less than five seconds.

This was their first training exercise with guns. Young as she was, Natalia knew the Red Room. Usually, their exercises were lethal as the children they were making into weapons.

This one wasn't.

There were targets, set up outside over a large area.

Fifteen targets, sixteen bullets.

Most of the girls breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the extra bullet. Failing a training exercise meant death, at worst, and being the subject of a lesson in torture, at best.

They had half an hour.

Natalia circled the snowed-in field, counting gunshots as she emptied bullets into targets, one in each. Perfect bullseyes, all of them. Her hands were steady as the heavy-set buildings that watched over her, and her eyes were as sharp as the binoculars through which the trainers watched.

Before she hit the last target, Natalia removed the cartridge from the gun. Each one had her name printed on it, and she felt a cold shock of fear run through her.

Earlier that week, a trainer had made an offhand comment about shell casings. They were Russian spies and assassins. Nothing was offhand.

Natalia struggled to recall the exact words, then they came flooding back to her. " _Leaving shell casing behind means you can get caught. They can be identified to individual guns._ "

These casings had the student's names on them. If Natalia wasn't mistaken, so would the bullets, so they could extract them from the targets and know who had hit bullseye.

But when the instructors scoured the field, as Natalia was sure they would, they would find her shell casings. Even if they hadn't had her name on them, they could be traced back to an individual gun, which would be more dangerous in the real world.

Natalia fired her final target, the scooped up the shell casing, slipping it into her pocket. Even if she was wrong, it was better to be safe than sorry.

She had ten minutes left.

Natalia retraced her steps, a task made harder by the fact that she had been purposefully making her footprints light and indistinguishable.

She found the other fourteen cartridge shells. They all had her name in the same blocky font. She was right. The casings did have to be collected.

Curiously, she popped out the final cartridge, the one containing the bullet she hadn't had to shoot.

It didn't have her name on it.

_Klava Smirnova._

She knew that girl. She was strong, taller than Natalia, with dark hair that was close-cropped to her head.

This was her bullet.

The Red Room didn't make mistakes. This was on purpose.

Natalia had two options.

Hope she was doing the right thing and shoot the bullet at a random target, leaving the casing on the ground to be found and traced to Klava.

Or she could do what was more in the style of their normal training exercises.

Shoot Klava.

It was an easy. She had to survive, had to remain strong, of marble and steel. (She didn't want to, but she  _had_  to.)

She fired the gun.

The bullet arced across the snowy landscape, faster than the eye could see.

There was a wet thud that Natalia could barely hear over the sudden silence, and then the dark shape Natalia had spotted at the base of a copse of trees fell to the ground. Klava.

Her mission was completed, but someone still had her bullet. They would know what they had to do now.

Driven by some instinct, adrenaline still pumping with the steel in her veins, she dropped to the ground, feeling the bullet whisk over her head. It landed, hissing with heat, in the snowbank.

Natalia dove after it. Sure enough, it had her name printed on it.

The second time she saw a bullet like that was a few weeks later.

A girl had failed a training exercise.

Normally, she would be taken to just outside the compound, and the gunshot would echo back through the buildings, but no one would dare look up.

This time, they had decided to let one of the trainees do it. It was a privilege, they told Natalia, as she was selected to move forward to where the girl knelt at the front of the room.

It was Natalia's one acquaintance within the group of girls. Her name was Tanya Ivashin, and the day before she had smiled at Natalia, one bright spot in the grey and bloodstains of the Red Room.

Natasha had retracted from reality. She saw everything like it was far, far away, but it was with morbid curiosity that she removed the cartridge from the gun she was handed. Sure enough, it read  _Tanya Ivashin_. A sick feeling grew in her stomach as she realized that all the girls who had been killed had died with bullets that had their names on them buried in their heads.

She buried Tanya's bullet in Tanya's head, then turned to the instructor and handed the gun and the shell back.

It also meant that for every girl that was still alive, there was a named bullet.

Natalia never wanted to see hers in a barrel facing her.  _Survive, survive, girl of marble and steel._

* * *

 

The next time she paid attention to the bullet casings she was thirteen, completing her first mission, in Berlin of all places.

They were given the supplies they had spent the week preparing; a passport, fake identity papers, a hotel key. They were handed a slip of paper with the names of the five targets, and a small gun. The gun had five cartridges in a pouch. Also in the pouch was a small engraving tool.

It was an hour later, on the roof of the hotel opposite where the first target lived, that Natalia considered the tool.

The cartridges where blank. It didn't feel right, after having shot with bullets that had her name written on them for five and a bit years.

If she inscribed her name on them, someone would go looking for her, and find the Red Room, and HYDRA. That was the one thing she absolutely could not do, under those circumstances.

But these bullets still carried death, still would kill.

So she pulled out each cartridge, and one at a time inscribed the target's name on to them. It was a tradition, and it made seem like it was fate that the targets would die. (Anything was better than knowing it was  _her_ fault they were dead.)

Five targets. Five cartridges. She couldn't kill all the targets, of course, but she didn't know which one she would find after she had assassinated this one.

She chose the bullet with the high-ranking business man's name on and slotted it back into the gun.

An hour and a half later, she headed back to the extraction point, gun in her bag two bullets lighter.

* * *

 

One of her later missions was after a Red Room assassin who had failed a mission. This mission was special; not only to the Red Room, who had a mistake on their bloodstained hands, but to Natalia. She was told that the girl had failed the mission. Natalia knew better. The failure had been one of the best from Natalia's year, and they were the two left.

The girl had done what Natalia had never considered, but always,  _always,_  wanted. She had refused to complete the mission. She had let the Governor's daughter live. She had chosen mercy.

Natalia didn't know how to deal with the pain and the envy and the  _want_ she was feeling (until Clint, but he came later).

It was with confusion and vengeance that she inscribed her own name below the girl's on the bullet.

This was her bullet she was shooting. It wasn't HYDRA's. She wanted the girl dead, and so she died.

The bullet had Natalia's name on it.

Perhaps she killed part of herself that day, the girl remaining a reminder of what would happen if she failed, or refused.

She belonged to the Red Room, to HYDRA.

Yes, she thought later. Perhaps she had shot down her mercy with that bullet, as well as the girl who had fallen from the balcony as she raised her drink in a salute to the sunset (and to Natalia and death, even through the girl didn't know it).

Her mercy died with the girl, and was born again with Clint.

* * *

 

When she graduated, her bullets where already engraved with the target's name. On large missions, she would have clips of plain cartridges. Engraved bullets were for targets, and targets only.

When she earned the name of the Black Widow, left the days of being the Young Asset behind, her bullets changed again.

Each one had a little widow's hourglass engraved on them.

Everyone who she shot felt her bite.

Important targets had their bullets, specially named, but everyone else got a Widow's bullet. Something about that never sat right with Natalia. In her mind, corrupted by the Red Room, deaths were necessary, but lives should never be wasted. (The whole thing didn't sit right with her, not when she realized one of her targets was an innocent person, but she could never say that or she would be the one with a named bullet speeding towards her.)

(The memory of the girl who had refused lay heavy on her mind.)

* * *

 

When Clint found her, recruited her, saved her, she had a bullet with his name on it.

He was part of the assassin community. He would have heard about the named bullets.

They were wresting in an alleyway somewhere, gun and bow both useless at such close range.

She was weak from blood loss and tired, oh  _so_ tired, off the Red Room's philosophy. She hadn't been back into cyro, or had her mind wiped, in a while, and she had absorbed ideas from western culture that seemed better than the Red Room.

He started talking.

She listened.

A minute into his impromptu speech, her hand went for her pistol, wrapping around its familiar handle. She hesitated, and drew it out.

She ran her hand down its side.

She didn't shoot.

Clint watched with wide eyes as she broke the gun open, pulling out the cartridge.

She handed it to him,  _Clinton Barton_  engraved into it.

She handed him his life back.

She could have taken it, but she didn't.

It was that mercy that made him so sure he was bringing her back in.

He knew that each bullet was a life, and that he was being given his.

* * *

 

The bullet casing that was lying on Natasha's floor was different from the ones that she had shot.

A year after she had defected to SHIELD, she noticed she was being tailed.

She didn't tell Clint. She didn't tell SHIELD.

She got shot.

Clint got the shooter.

She owed him a debt.

She owed him more of a debt when he walked into her hospital room and thunked down the shell casing with her name on it.

He gave her her own life back from the Red Room.

The bullet that had been imbedded in her also had her name on it.

Now, she had faced down a bullet with her name on it, and lived.

She was in charge of her own life, now. The haunting shadow of HYDRA had gone.

* * *

 

Natasha stood shakily, cradling the brass in her hand. It was a morbid reminder, but it reminded her of how far she had come. She remembered the fear and the pain of knowing there was a named bullet hurtling her way, and she remembered how the anticipation was almost as bad as the gunshot itself, and the searing pain that she hadn't felt since the Red Room had decided to have pupils practise non-damaging shots on each other.

But she had survived, and she controlled her own life.

That didn't mean she still used named bullets.

No, her bullets were plain. She was well and truly tired of the engraved ones. _(Goodbye, HYDRA. Goodbye, memories.)_


	3. C for Child (she could never be one)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Natasha never got the chance to be a child. She has no memories of the time before the Red Room. Now, she has learnt what it was like to be a child, to smile and laugh and cry, but she still can't be one.
> 
> DISCLAIMER: None of the characters belong to me, I just have the privilege of playing with them. All rights go to Marvel.

Natasha didn't remember a time before the Red Room.

Once HYDRA had fallen, she went looking for any information they had kept about Natalia Romanoff.

There was none, just a document filled with her training information and missions. That was all that remained of her childhood. That, and a kill list.

Sometimes, though, Natasha liked to pretend she can remember something. SHIELD's psychology had come up with some device that was meant to restore her memories, but by that stage she had forgotten that she had forgotten anything before the Red Room. She couldn't even remember that they had wiped her memories of Natalia's short five years before HYDRA. When she joined SHIELD for the first time, they had managed to restore her memory back to the last time she was in Cryo, but that was it.

All she knew was the Red Room, and nothing SHIELD could do would bring her memories back.

They said it would get better with time. It didn't. After she was living at the Avengers complex, training the new Avengers, she still didn't remember.

On some nights, though, Natasha dreamt.

She was never sure if her dreams were the shredded remains of childhood memories, or fantasies concocted from watching Clint's children laugh and play and listening to Steve's stories of his own childhood.

The dream she had the first night at the Avenges complex was by far the best.

* * *

 

Natalia was running through falling burnished leaves, dancing and swirling. She was an autumn ballerina, flying and pirouetting over small logs and stones that littered her path. She was laughing, happy little giggles that portrayed nothing more than a girlish delight. The leaves were tumbling around her, gold and red and orange.

Natasha had never seen anything more beautiful in her life.

Natalia danced her way out from underneath the trees, running up to two figures. Natalia's parents. They were lying on the ground, staring up at the sky, hands joined. The falling leaves danced around them.

Natalia twirled her way around her father's head, red hair long and falling over her face, calling at him to get up.

Then Natasha woke up.

* * *

 

Natasha realized later that both of her parent's forms had been indistinct. She remembered that day, and the high emotions, but not her parents.

Inside the Red Room, there were no children. Girls as young as five wielded knives and learned how to trick and betray, but there were no children. Children died, and all that was left were machines made of false smiles and hidden guns.

Natalia hadn't been a child since they made her dance through the night and the next day when she was only five. She wasn't a child after she heard five girls die.

She wasn't a child when she killed her first girl, heard the neck go  _snap_ as they fought over a bed and a life.

In the red room, laughter was little more than a weapon, a tool to be refined and perfected. A tool they would use to worm their way in to hearts, before pulling out their guns and shooting the target dead,  _dead, **dead.**_

Dancing was nothing but a way to keep the girls strong but the muscles unnoticeable, a way of combining power with grace. It wasn't the pleasurable pastime of children.

Blank faces filled the Red Room, smiles carefully cultivated to be the perfect manipulator. Natural smiles, on the rare chance a girl allowed an emotion to show, were cruel and broken, daggers appearing behind pulled-tight lips.

A kind smile caused a girl to be shot. They could not be weak.

Natural smiles and laughter were forbidden, and so was crying.

One of the girls, who had fallen sixth in the dancing, cried the night afterwards.

She was weak, small and chubby and not what the Red Room wanted. They took her outside.

There was a bang, a thud, and then silence. They had shot a bullet with her name on it through her skull.

No one mentioned it, and the girls couldn't talk unless instructed to. Natalia never laughed, smiled or cried unless instructed to. She was marble and steel, and stone and metal didn't have emotions.

* * *

 

When she joined SHIELD, it was unnatural to want to smile. After she had been inspected by Fury, Clint had walked in.

Natasha couldn't remember what he said, but there was a weird twitch at the sides of her mouth. Clint was staring at her weirdly.

"What?" she growled, dropping the stereotypical American accent and letting her guttural Russian accent intimidate him.

He refused to be intimidated.

Instead, he laughed.

"You smiled!"

"I've been smiling a lot." There was nothing false about that. She had pulled up her perfectly sweet and unassuming smile ( _#3,_  the instructors in the back of her head droned,) plenty of times. It had fooled everyone.

"They were fake."

That was the first time she had realized Clint could see through her.

She stared at him in shock, and he hurried to reassure her.

"Don't worry, you have all the others convinced. I just know what a fake smile looks like. This time, it was a real smile."

She smiled more often after that, real, truthful smiles.

(She wondered how he knew what a fake smile looked like, when her smiles fooled more experienced spies.)

(Then she noticed his smiles were also fake, sometimes.)

(He was almost as broken as she was.)

* * *

 

A month later, she laughed for the first time, at Clint, whose petulant face was glaring at her from the air vents. It was his fault he was covered in suction cup darts. Natalia was so used to having a gun besides her at all times, shooting at all that had disturbed her, that SHIELD had decided to give Natasha (that's what she went by, there, and for once it didn't feel fake) a gun that fired darts with little suction cups. She could still shoot at anything that moved where it wasn't meant to, and she felt safe, but none of the SHIELD Agents were in danger from her trigger finger.

Clint had snuck up on her. She had known it was him, but she feinted sleep, lying on her bunk, hand curled loosely around the fake gun under her pillow. She heard him open the grill, sticking his head out, and she opened fire, eyes still closed and breathing even.

A few seconds later, she opened her eyes. His face was covered in the darts, grey eyes staring up at her mournfully.

He started to ask her how she knew exactly where he was, even in the dark, before cutting himself off with "Of course, you're Russian. Sometimes I think all Russians have had a super soldier serum."

He laughed, and she laughed with him.

He was pretty far off the mark. She was the only living one from her batch of serum, and it was only Red Room assassins. Still, he was so close to the truth and it put all of her hardship in a comedic light, so she laughed.

He said nothing, but smiled harder.

* * *

 

It was a few months after that before she cried in front of Clint.

They had just finished a mission, but there had been a casualty. A small girl, six years old, who had smiled a Natasha, waving to a stranger in a crowd.

She had been held as hostage by the target, causing absolute mayhem in the ballroom.

Nat shot the man, clean through the head.

He fell.

As he fell, his grip on the knife held to the girl's throat slipped, and she fell, gurgling in a pool of her own blood.

They were back at SHIELD HQ before it set in. They were in Clint's quarters, and she turned to him.

"Why do my eyes burn?"

"Oh, Nat," he whispered sorrowfully. "You want to cry."

He didn't seem like he would mind, and by the time the sun had risen they were a tear-stained tangled mess on Clint's bed. Neither of them had slept a wink, instead taking turns to hold the other as misery wailed, using them as mouthpieces.

Actually crying, Natasha discovered, was nothing like pretending to cry. Crocodile tears didn't make her face feel scrubbed raw, eyes puffy and sore. Clint was in no better state, so she figured it was just normal.

(Yes, he was almost as broken as she was.)

* * *

 

She learned to laugh and smile, and even cry, around the Avengers as well.

She laughed, actually laughed, when she was undercover at Stark Industries. Stark had just remarked drily that any of his employees could have been spying on him, and he wouldn't be able to tell who.

He was so right that it made her lose her cover of Natalie, letting a laugh that was pure Natasha.

She smiled when she was first with all the Avengers. They were all puzzle pieces, all odd shapes and warped, but together they could do anything. The trouble was getting the team together, but that wasn't her problem, so she rested her head on Clint's shoulder and smiled.

She cried into Wanda's shoulder after Bruce disappeared. She hadn't loved him, but she had liked him. He was a genuinely good person, and her emotions had been torn to pieces by the battle.

She cried in Tony's slightly awkward arms when she first remembered that she had been the Young Asset. Of all of them, he understood being made and abused the most. She was just an extreme of what had happened to him. MIT in his early teens, Red Room from the age of five up for her. Making weapons for most of his life was similar to her assassinations.

He knew what it was to be unmade. He had been torn apart in the cave in Afghanistan, but had pieced himself together with Pepper's help, like what Clint had done for her.

* * *

 

Natasha dreamed the dream again, months after the first time, just before the war they stylized the Infinity War. This time, it was a nightmare. It looked the same, felt the same. The leaves had never been leaves.

They were flames.

Natalia was running through falling embers, dancing and swirling out of the way of chunks of falling debris. She was a burning ballerina, flying over fires and burning wreckage that littered her path. She was crying, small sobs that portrayed nothing less than pure sorrow. The flames were roaring around her, gold and red and orange.

Natasha had never seen anything more devastating in her life.

Natalia danced her way out from underneath the falling buildings, running up to two figures. Natalia's parents. They were lying on the ground, staring up at the sky, hands joined. The falling embers danced around them.

Natalia dodged her way through the falling, burning debris, moving around to her father's head. Her red hair was long and falling over her face as she started calling at him to get up. He didn't move. She screamed at him.

He didn't move.

The flames consumed him and Natalia's mother, scorching the young girl.

Then Natasha woke up.

* * *

 

She tried to convince herself it was just a nightmare. It had never happened.

But Natasha had no experience with telling herself that nightmares weren't memories. She could dispel the ghosts of those who she had killed, but she had never had any memories as devastating as the dream.

For Natalia had been a child when she went to the Red Room, but she was never a child again. Natasha was learning how to be a child. She was learning that it was alright to smile and laugh and cry, so she did all three.

HYDRA had stolen her childhood, and she would never get it back, but she could learn all the things she should have learned then.

It was alright to be a child.

So Natasha grabbed her favourite knife and headed to the practise area to slice up some dummies.

It was okay to be a child, but she couldn't afford to break. She couldn't afford to be a child, and never had been able to.

Maybe, sometime in the future she would find out who she was. Maybe she would allow herself to be a child, to smile and laugh and cry, and enjoy all the small things without worrying. (She always has been a child, at heart, but she pushed it away.)

Some day.

For now, she had to remain marble and steel; hold herself high for the rest of the team. Most of them where barely holding it together themselves. Tony was breaking down every night, and Steve wasn't much better.

They had hidden it from the rest of the team, but they couldn't hide it from her. She was too good at reading people.

If she fell too, if she allowed herself to be a child, just once, the team would crumble. They couldn't afford to fall. Steve and Tony would fall if she did. They were forcing themselves to stay strong while she was.

No, she couldn't afford to be a child.

Not even once.

(The child inside her screamed that it  _wasn't fair_ , and she agreed silently. No, it wasn't fair, but when had life ever been fair to any of them?)


	4. D for Death (it always followed her)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some people see death as Death, a man. Some people just see it as death, a termination of life. But no matter how she saw it, or what her name was, death always followed the-girl-who-became-Natasha.  
> 

Death always watched Natasha (Natalia, Natalie, Maya, Black Widow, Russian Death, name upon name upon person upon mission), staring over her shoulder even when she wasn't aware of it. After the Red Room, she felt his prickling gaze, rising the hair on the back of her neck as she stared into her (and his) victim's blank and empty eyes.

She never saw him, and never had him bending of her. She came close, but he never took her. Perhaps it was just her imagination, just the great mystery of death.

Clint said he saw Death, once.

Natasha knew better.

That was her, even if neither of them had known it at the time.

* * *

 

When Natasha was a child, not only young, but a child, Death was still everywhere.

Natalia's family wasn't poor, not by any standard. Natalia wouldn't have had to work for a living until she left home, if she had ever had the chance to. But the village she lived in was a different matter. Three years after Natalia was born, a sickness spread through the village. It wasn't deadly in most cases, but the townspeople where malnourished and weak, and none could afford a doctor. Death haunted every corner and gaunt faces with sickly yellow eyes stared warily out of every window. Natalia's family survived, but many didn't. The streets were filled with decay, and images of people being carted out of their homes burned themselves into Natalia's mind. At three years old, she didn't think about death, didn't look and see it echoing in everyone else's eyes, didn't feel a forbidding curiosity. It just fixed itself in her young mind. If she had remained a child, death would be her earliest memory.

But she hadn't, and the Red Room had stolen her memories.

If Natasha had remembered, she wouldn't have been sure whether it was a blessing or a curse.

(Sometimes, in her sleep, she heard hacking coughs and wailing families, hidden under the sweet melody of her mother's voice.)

* * *

 

When Natalia had had her childhood stripped from her, Death was more prevalent.

Each time another girl fell, her skin prickled and seethed beneath her thin, sweat soaked clothing. There would always be a bang, and something deep inside her would sigh.

Whether it was in despair or relief (or joy,  _please don't let it be joy_ ), she could never tell.

She hoped it was in despair, while she was starting her training, after the first dancers fell. She hoped that she was human, hating the loss of life. She was five, and she could feel Death leaning over her shoulder, considering the girls. Death judged them, and they were found lacking. Bang. Bang bang bang. Bang. Five shots with named bullets, death soaring down to scoop up the girls. Natalia knew it was despair she felt, then. Despair for five lives cut short, and despair for those left, for the suffering she knew would follow.

* * *

 

Death didn't leave then. He hung around, the glint in their instructor's eyes, the blood leaking out onto the snow.

When she was finishing her training, it was relief she felt. Her first mission was three years before she graduated. She was thirteen. She shot her bullets through two men's hearts, and watched as they bled out, one in the middle of a party through a sniper's scope, and the other on a mattress, blood staining the sheets red in a crimson tide. She felt relief then, knowing she had succeeded, knowing that she wasn't going to be one of the girls shot. There were eight of them, given five targets. Natalia took two of those for her own. Four girls died. Again, she felt relief, sickening relief. She had lived. She was steel and marble and she had lived.

When Natasha looked back on those days, she was nauseated. She had contained little regard for human life, instead trusting herself in the shadow of death. Each time Natalia took a life during her training, she had been relieved it wasn't her (Natasha wasn't like that, anymore. She hoped, hoped, hoped). Death was always there, present in each bullet she fired, each knife she blunted slashing at the dummies, and in the eyes of each of those she killed.

* * *

 

Then she graduated. Natasha wasn't sure what had happened to Natalia after the graduation. All she remembered was the click of a gun or a knife sliding into a holster, and the names that filled her mind each time she closed her eyes. And she remembered the fierce pleasure that had permeated each pore of her being each time she had completed a mission and returned home. The girl that had been the child-who-was-also-called-Natalia, and the girl who Natalia had been during training... They fell beneath the new Natalia, the Black Widow who reveled in death, who was formed of marble and steel.

* * *

 

Bucky remembered it too, when Natasha asked. Together, they theorized that HYDRA had programmed them to  _enjoy_ the act of killing. Natasha looked up the few images (three, in total) of her that SHIELD had taken before Clint brought her in. There was one, ten years before Clint, where Black Widow was poised above a man, black stains leaking down his shirt in the black and white photograph. Her eyes were cold and wild, filled with an alien pleasure that shocked Natasha to the bone.

Natalia, post-training, had felt a cold and cruel pleasure from killing, and that almost tore Natasha apart. She couldn't even think back respectfully on her victims without having an unholy pleasure echoing out of the black hole where the memories of the Black Widow's missions rested. It was Clint who saved her then. He asked about  _Natasha_ 's relationship with death.

* * *

 

Once SHIELD deprogrammed her, Natasha was different. Death didn't faze her, but it had never fazed Natalia, no matter what form she was in. She felt sorrow for each life she took, but recognized it was necessary. And when she cried, for the first time in decades, over the little innocent girl's death on a mission gone wrong, she knew she was human.

Maybe Natalia hadn't been human, in those decades she had been controlled by HYDRA after her graduation. Maybe, she was little more than a machine. The Black Widow was programmed to enjoy death, to enjoy pain, in a fierce rush that would leave her waiting for her next encounter with Death.

But Natasha was human. Natasha felt her eyes burn when innocents where collected by Death, always accompanied by the prickling on the back of her neck. Natasha didn't revel in the suffering of (other) humans.

* * *

 

Natasha judged Death, and found it unsavoury, necessary, and her job. She judged Death and realized that she was skilled in bringing it to those who should be killed, and so she would. She didn't love death. She didn't consider  _it_ as anything more than a means to an end.

Death judged Natasha, and found her lacking. Death hunted Natasha, but she was still steel and marble and she outran death, twisting her web of life and forcing him to take those who she needed gone.

Natasha was the master of death but not its lover or its demented victim; Clint was by her side, reminding her she was human.

* * *

 

The Black Widow, Natalia after her training, hadn't judged Death. Instead, she had danced with  _him_ , like a puppet on a string pulled by HYDRA. She had reveled in the wake of Death, taking it with her wherever she went, destruction and misery her pets. Natalia loved Death, loved the rush and the blank eyes. She courted him, leaving scores of offerings staring with empty eyes at the heavens for Death to collect.

Death had judged that Black Widow, and found her a companion. Death and the Black Widow were synonyms to HYDRA. Where one went, the other was sure to be found. Death danced with the Widow, twirling through the decades and the continents with her until they had become one. Death courted Natalia when she was the Black Widow, twirling with the danger and destruction that flowed from in between her perfectly painted lips.

* * *

 

When Clint said he saw Death once, he was wrong. It was Natalia, cloaked in darkness for once, watching from near the wall as the man Agent Barton was meant to be escorting convulsed on the ground. SHIELD had been too late. They had sent a team to cover for the politician during the ball, but they hadn't watched him in the weeks leading up to it. The Black Widow had slipped a slow-moving, undetectable poison into his coffee a fortnight earlier.

Clint thought he saw Death looking at him, eyes muddied with a furious, cruel joy as the man died.

He hadn't.

He had seen the Widow.

 

Everyone either didn't think of Death as a person, or were superstitious and saw him as a darkly cloaked man. Death wasn't male. Death was the Black Widow, hidden by smiles and pretty dresses and party lighting rather that the shadows. Death was Natalia, until Natasha found herself.

* * *

 

During the Red Room training, Natalia had avoided judging Death. She lived beside it, learning everything she could about death and how to bring it with her. She was steel and marble, and she refused to be taken by Death.

Death judged that young Natalia, and judged her unworthy. He tried to take her, but she pushed him towards the other girls. She had taken the bed of one of the girls in the Red Room, avoiding death in a training exercise designed to root out the weak by their trainers. He took the other girl, the one Natalia offered with the  _snap_ of a broken neck, and looked at Natalia with dark eyes. She was marble and steel, and she refused to bend.

* * *

 

The child Natalia had been had known death, but hadn't thought about it.

Death saw Natalia, and watched as she survived. She survived the sickness, and the fire. She forged herself of marble and steel, and  _survived._

She refused to be taken by death.

After that, death followed her.


	5. E for Enemy (she is told who they are)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clint alone would not have swayed the Black Widow, so what was the mission that made her realize that some of her enemies weren't here enemies?
> 
> Enter Drakov's daughter, the one mission that would make her flinch even as the Widow.
> 
> Warning: Physical and Emotional torture, and twisted characters.

When Natalia was a child, before HYDRA, she had enemies. She had a childish hate for the four-year-old boy who had stolen her favorite doll when she was three. Every time he ran past the fence of her house her cheeks would wobble and she would scream.

Her mortal enemy was the grey, tasteless mash her mother would try to coax past her spittle-covered lips. She fought every mouthful with a vengeance her parents had never would have thought to see in a child. There was fire that burned in her, even then, that let her survive. But when she was young, each enemy seemed so large and hateful. Each of her foes were simple, innocent. Childish.

* * *

 

When HYDRA took her, her enemies metamorphosed and became real, cold, and deadly. When she danced for her life in the Red Room, marble bones refusing to let her drop as the sun rose and fell, her enemy was the exhaustion creeping like the winter through her veins. Her enemy was the blood that slicked the concrete floor, dripping from ballet shoes, a crimson wave that promised pain and destruction. Her enemy was the exhaustion that fought to make its way through her stone body, trying to get her eyes to slip closed, her arms to lower, her feet to still, her body to fall…

She conquered those enemies. She infused her bones with marble, and later, her blood with steel.

She still had enemies, though. Each training exercise was an adversary that Natalia learnt to analyse, and dispatch with cold precision that contained a hint of the fire that still burned inside her. Her enemies hid in her trainers' blank eyes, lurking behind every gun, inside every straw or wood target that she decimated.

* * *

 

Each of the girls was an enemy, Natalia soon realized. She couldn't afford ally herself with any of them, for they were fighting against each other in the war for survival. Each time one of them fell, the tactics that she was using to win the battle changed, another enemy gone from the playing field. That didn't mean she didn't feel compassion, except… she didn't feel compassion for the other girls. Somewhere during the fight her ears had grown deaf to the screams of the pitiful under fire, and her eyes had grown blind to the tortured eyes of the enemy soldiers.  
Perhaps that was what allowed her to live, to survive, and become the Young Asset.

She didn't care about the enemies she killed, even if they were not enemies.

The day she shot the runaway assassin girl from the Red Room, Natalia thought she was shooting down an enemy. After all, she was told that the girl was an enemy. Perhaps, that day, she shot down her remaining kindness, the one ally she had in the fight for survival.

* * *

 

Then she became the Young Asset, then the Black Widow. She didn't know what her enemies were, just aimed and fired, deceived and smiled, flirted and defeated, as HYDRA told her. The Black Widow knew who her enemies were, and she knew that they were not HYDRA.

It didn't matter if she thought differently during some missions. HYDRA neatly and precisely pulled the memories from her brain, leaving her an open ( _cracking_ ) vessel of fear and death, ready for refreezing or a new bloodstained mission. If it wasn't for the names that still rotated through Natasha's head, she wouldn't have remembered any of the Black Widow's targets. They were enemies that were eliminated as efficiently as possible, as per instructions ( _programming,_ her mind whispered, after she had escaped).

Then came the mission that changed it all.

* * *

 

"Это ваша миссия, имущество (T _his is your mission, Asset_ )," the cold voice snapped, slapping the documents down on the plain table in front of the Black Widow.

"да, господин ( _Yes, master)_ ," the Widow replied, voice blank and sculpted from ice. She had just been pulled from the cryrogenic chamber for the last time, and that was why SHIELD's deprogramming unblocked the memory for  _Natasha_ , after she had claimed herself back, casting away the parts of Natalia and the Black Widow that didn't fit her. HYDRA had been stupid. They had kept her out of cryo for a decade, using weekly memory wipes. They had needed her frequently, but it was still a mistake, for it allowed her to retain a sense of self.

Years later, Natasha still remembered the recovered memories of everything the Widow saw on the files that were handed to her.

**Political management**

Nothing unusual there. Files labelled 'Political management' were normal. They usually referred to assassinations or threats that would remove a threat to HYDRA, or the people paying HYDRA. The only unusual thing about this file was that it was in English.

**Target: Ivan Drakov**

Nothing unusual there, either. Drakov was a high-ranking government official who was starting to disagree with HYDRA, as the information that followed indicated. He would have to be silenced. If the Black Widow had been thinking for herself, she would have wondered how HYDRA planned to silence Drakov  
\- probably with assassination - without the public getting suspicious.

**Method: Drakov's daughter**

But they wouldn't. HYDRA was planning on forcing him to fade into the background, using his daughter. No one would notice.

**Daughter to be threatened, Drakov to stand down.**

Normal proceedings. A caring father would step down from his political views to protect his darling daughter.

**If Drakov persists, threats to be followed out;**

The Widow found that vaguely interesting. In her limited, surgically arranged memory, she could only recall a few times that her threats had failed. HYDRA must be worried about Drakov if they were ordering her to be prepared to carry out her threats.

**daughter to be eliminated**

That was more interesting still. HYDRA was worried enough about this man that they were ready to unleash one of their best assassins to look after a novice job. If the Black Widow still had the sense of humor buried deep inside her, she would have snorted. They were ordering a girl they had stolen and made into a weapon to use the life of another girl as a weapon. The whole business was morbidly ironic to the modern Natasha, but the Black Widow had had no sense of humor.

* * *

 

It was only three hours later that the Widow was walking up the drive to Drakov's mansion. She slipped easily into the persona that had been selected for the mission, sliding into the slightly rushed but comfortable walk of 'Alyssa Domav'. She fixed a smile  _(# 15, delicate and kind, with an element of firmness_ ) onto her face, making sure her eyes crinkled just the right amount. Her no-nonsense boots clacked on the gravel, and she tightened her hand around her bag.

Then, she became Alyssa.

Alyssa was a well-educated, sensible woman, searching for employment. Alyssa was safe, and plain, and normal. Alyssa was sweet and kind, but firm, and had a good reputation, backed up with statements from her (non-existent) previous employees.

Alyssa knocked on the door, and waited, the smile sweet and unassuming ( _smile #23,_ the Widow thought). Even her shining blue eyes were perfectly in character, flickering around in undisguised awe at the outside of the lavish mansion. But even the eyes were a mask, a perfectly painted persona slipped into by the Black Widow. In truth, her smile held fangs, and her eyes were blank and filled with Death's dark reflection. She was the perfect imposter.

The door opened after the third tap.

An elderly butler appeared, mouth set in a stiff line.

"Welcome Miss Domav," he said in Russian. "The Master will see you."

Alyssa walked into the foyer of the mansion, pretending not to notice as the butler removed her coat and took her bag. Inside, she was cataloguing the butler's every movement, noting down his weaknesses.

Ah. There was the crack he had that would allow her to push in her fingers and  _twist,_ sending him to the floor. His hands were clean and smooth, a relic of his lifetime as a butler, except for one spot. His right ring finger was scarred, right where a ring would have sat. From the quick look Alyssa was able to get at his finger, it seemed like he had been allergic to his ring but kept in on for a long time, and the ring was no longer there. A dead wife then. That was something the Widow could tear open, like a calculating wild beast, let him bleed his pain and misery as she took what she needed.

The butler – yet unnamed, for Alyssa wouldn't talk to a servant as she was ushered to the master of the family, because it would be unprofessional and she would be too nervous – escorted her to the office. Alyssa kept her eyes firmly where they were headed, but internally the Widow was cataloguing each room they passed and its contents, drawing a detailed map of the mansion.

It didn't take long for them to reach the office. Alyssa sat, carefully mentally noting down Drakov's mannerisms. He was afraid of something, even as she nodded along.

"My wife is away for several weeks," he said in smooth, polished Russian.  _Wife._ _No crack there, unlike the butler._ "I need someone to watch over my small daughter. She's six, too young to travel with her mother."

"I can do that, sir," Alyssa replied, careful not to look to eager.

"I am sure you are able," was Drakov's reply. "I am just worried…" He petered off with a sigh.

He was worried over the safety of his daughter.

But it only took a few more careful words from Alyssa to secure the job.

The Black Widow was in position.

* * *

 

The next memory that stood out, when  _Natasha_  thought about the Drakov case decades later, was when she met the daughter.

The butler escorted her to a large room, dominated by a central table and shelves upon shelves of books. "The young miss will be here in a few minutes, Miss Domav."

He exited the room, leaving the Widow ( _Alyssa_ , she reminded herself) alone. Alyssa studied the room, noting the three doors that lead out of it. There was the one she had come through, and two others, dark wood freshly polished and gleaming in the light reflected off the white walls and streaming in through the wide window.

Cat-like, Alyssa trod towards the doors. Pulling open the one on the left, she was greeted by a plain room, walls painted white and a simple bed and dresser in the corner. This, she supposed, was to be her room. The room stank of loneliness, of emptiness. Glancing around, she could spot fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four different spots to hide her various weapons. Her bag was already in the corner. That was irrelevant for the moment, so Alyssa closed the door, mindful of the squeaky hinges.

The other door hid a room that was distinguishably more lived in. The walls were pained pale pink, and it was a testament to how messed up the Black Widow's mind was when Natasha, years later, could remember her first thought on the color:  _easy to get blood off._ The room was dominated by a queen sized bed, covered in soft cream blankets and plush pillows. There were symbols of the little girl everywhere, from the childish drawings displayed on the wall, to the tattered state of the rocking chair in the corner. A small piano was underneath the window, chipped and ragged. The room was filled with a sense of family and belonging, a love the Widow had no connection to. She sniffed. Something about it felt wrong to her, but decades later and years older Natasha realized it was her who hadn't fitted in the room, where acceptance and love were everywhere.

Alyssa moved back to the table, just in time. The patter of young feet down the hall was unmistakable, even as the butler called out with fondness in his voice, "Careful, Miss! Don't run inside the house."

The doors burst open, revealing an angelic face, plump and rosy and smiling unabashedly. Her hair was blonde and her eyes were blue, and there was nothing generally remarkable about her except for the innocence she exuded. This girl was untouched by the evil in the world, the death and destruction, the very forces Alyssa bought with her.

The girl remembered herself, tempering down her grin to a pretty smile. "Hello, Miss Domav." She curtseyed, and for a moment the Widow was Natalia again, feeling blood dripping from her feet, young and having the innocence torn from her as she repeated the curtsey again and again, instructors looming over her shoulder.

Alyssa smiled, the edges worn by memories she half-recollected and knowledge of what was to come. "Hello, Miss Drakov. What's your first name?"

"Natasha, Miss Domav," the girl replied.

"Do you mind if I all call you that?"

"No, miss."

Alyssa waved the butler away, calling Natasha closer.

The young girl held up a chubby fist, ballet shoes, pristine and a creamy pink, dangling from her fingers. "I will put my dancing shoes away, miss."

The Black Widow watched as she skipped into her room, remembering nights gone by when she was a similar age to Natasha, dancing for hours and hours, the girls not strong enough to carry on being shot. The blood stained her memory, but she pushed it away. HYDRA let the Widow keep those memories, for they are part of her character. Even though most of her training was muscle memory by that point, the memories helped her recall all the lessons she had learned.

Natasha was so similar to what Natalia had been, before the Red Room had found her.

* * *

 

The Black Widow left the first threatening note the next day, disguising her handwriting as heavy and masculine. The senior Drakov buried his face in his hands when his daughter's scream bought him racing to the room. He was handed the note by a trembling Alyssa, who knew exactly what it said.

**Stop talking, Drakov. Your precious girl may be hurt.**

It didn't take long for Drakov to collect himself, pulling himself upright and hugging his daughter. He spared Alyssa no second glance, not even noting that she was perfectly white and scared, perhaps too perfectly. Ivan Drakov left the room calling for his butler and the other servants, to see if they had seen anyone.

They wouldn't have.

The Back Widow was too good at her job for that.

* * *

 

Later that day, Alyssa clapped as Natasha spun across the dance floor, an innocent angel in a pale blue dress. She followed Natasha as the young six-year-old grabbed her by the hand, not caring about her ballet shoes as she pulled Alyssa out of the room and out of the house, into a grove of trees. Alyssa helped her clamber up, marvelling at how this small creature could be so unafraid. Of course, when Natalia was six she had been unafraid, but that was different. Natasha had a reckless and carefree attitude, whereas Natalia had spent long months of pain teaching herself not to care.

When Natasha tumbled out of the tree, it was Alyssa who held her tight, muttering into her ear that she was "safe, nothing is going to hurt you. I've got you." (L _ies. All lies. Somehow, lies cut her tongue as much as the truth would have.)_

* * *

 

The Widow got word from HYDRA that Drakov hadn't stopped. The next note she sent was stained with blood. It wasn't young Natasha's blood, but instead the Widow's own from a careful cut on her leg that would be unnoticeable and not hinder her.

**We will not wait much longer.**

Drakov shook when his daughter found the note in the book she was reading. Again, he didn't spare a thought for Alyssa, didn't spare a thought to how HYDRA had known what book Natasha was reading.

* * *

 

Two days later, Drakov hadn't changed. It was too easy for the Black Widow to pull on a black, form obscuring cloak, and drop her voice as low as it could go. She could be anyone, male, female, old, young, Russian or not. She looked like death.

The Widow knelt over Natasha's bed, shaking her awake more gently that she should have. He made sure the moonlight streaming through the window that  _Alyssa_ had carefully left open glanced off the gun she held. "Tell your father that he must stop. Or I will hurt you," she rasped. "Don't move. I will kill you if you do."

The Widow barely had time to fade back into her room and strip off her cloak, stuffing it away and sliding into the bed to feign sleep before there was a patter of feet and her door creaked open, showing a tearstained face.

Alyssa comforted the girl, as best she could. "Shush, it's okay, I've got you. You are alright. No one will hurt." Again, it was all lies.

Natasha stank of fear, and it took a few minutes before she had calmed, tears dried on her face. Alyssa escorted her to the master bedroom, where Natasha explained what had happened in a voice that trembled with fear and trust in those around her.

The Black Widow already knew what the outcome would be. Drakov wouldn't change, not even to save his daughter's life.

The Black Widow wished, the sensation of longing foreign, that she was actually Alyssa when she was holding Natasha to her chest in her bed, rocking the girl to sleep as she cried, so trusting in the people around her. Natasha was so innocent, so pure. She was everything Natalia had never had the chance to be.

* * *

 

Three days later, the Widow was wearing the cloak again, holding a struggling Natasha to her side with an arm wrapped around her and a gun to her forehead. Drakov was frozen in front of her.

Over the week the Widow had been there, she had noticed that while Drakov wouldn't back down, he was irrevocably tied to his daughter. If Natasha died, so would something inside Drakov. He would be much easier for HYDRA to manage after that.

The snaps echoed around the silent room, and through the Widow's mind. Slowly, methodically, she broke each finger of the girl she had looked after for a week, ignoring the way something inside her was ripping, fragile. Drakov watched, mouth open and eyes weeping in an ugly cocktail of terror, disbelief, and pain. The young Natasha had gone into shock, tiny breath huffing in and out as tears streamed silently down her face. She was past normal fear and into absolute and mortal terror. The Widow tormented her for many more minutes, knowing she was breaking Drakov as well as his daughter's body.

Drakov screamed when the bullet from the Widow's gun went through his daughter's head, leaving her bloody and battered on the floor. The fragile thing deep inside the Widow screamed too, as it was ripped apart. As Natasha fell, the Widow was reminded of another girl, a decade or so older than Natasha, who had fallen from a balcony with one of Natalia's bullets buried inside in her heart. That girl had refused a mission from the Red Room, and so she had been killed as she raised a glass to her freedom. Now, the Widow who had grown, twisted and jagged, from Natalia, wished she could have refused this mission.

A week later, Drakov had dropped off the political radar entirely.

* * *

 

The Red Room congratulated the Black Widow with another successful mission, pleasure racing through her veins, but it felt hollow. Surely, killing someone so innocent was not worth a reward?

The Black Widow forgot all of the mission, save for the words  _Drakov's daughter_ when she was brainwiped later that day.

She forgot it until she had gone to SHIELD, and agreed to join them. SHIELD unblocked her memories, up to the last time she went into cryo. Natasha was her main reason for joining the Americans. When she had killed the young girl, she wasn't sure who her enemy was.

When she was asked to sign her name, she made herself a new one. She remembered a girl who had been everything she could never allow herself to be, a girl who was, above all things, a child, and took that name for her own. It felt more right that Natalia, or Alyssa, or The Asset, or the Black Widow. It didn't feel false at all. She didn't have to become Natasha, for she already was.

After she joined SHIELD, she knew the people on the pointy end of her smiles and guns were wrong. She knew they were her enemies.

But best of all, SHIELD gave her and Clint the option to turn down a mission.

She could control who her enemies were, keep them boxed away and certain.

And she would honor Drakov's daughter's memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have a cinquain about the persona dilemma:
> 
> Inside  
> Turmoil obscures  
> Can you tell between your  
> perfectly painted persona  
> and you?


	6. F for Family (she found one, it broke)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Natasha's view on family, and Civil War.  
> Contains swearing. Mainly in different languages.

Of all the roles that Natasha (and Natalia) had to play, a happy family member was the hardest.

For starters, she had never had a caring family to base her persona off. She was grasping at straws whenever she had to pretend to know what a family was.

When she had been little, family hadn't mattered. She had just accepted it, never minding if she tore at her mother's hair or left grubby handprint on her father's work shirt. They always laughed and smiled down at little Natalia, the bright light in their eyes a mere reflection of the burning inferno of happiness and determination that was Natalia's soul.

* * *

 

The Red Room was never a family. It was a competition, and the competitors were children and adolescents who could kill each other in a matter of heartbeats. Family couldn't exist. It was ripped out like a weed by the instructor, girl placed against girl and determined inferno sharpened into a deadly blaze that killed all who dared to come near. Natalia grew sharp and vicious and cold, the fire that burned within her honed to perfect disaster. She had no time for family, and the girls around her dropped to the ground one by one. They were fueled by fires much, much weaker than Natalia's. She never failed.

* * *

 

The Drakov family mission wasn't the only one that the Widow had to pretend to be a family member for, but it was the first one that she thought about what  _family_ meant – at least, until the mission was wiped from her memory. Drakov and his daughter were a family, and Alyssa was supposed to slot into that family, in the perfect place to manipulate them.

She did. She did it perfectly, and while she came to care for the young girl Natasha she still killed her. That was when she first truly understood how  _family_ was little more than a nuclear bomb of emotion. When Natasha died at the Widow's hand, Drakov broke. He fell into submission, exactly as HYDRA had wanted. Family was his breaking point. The Black Widow noted that down.

* * *

 

When Clint found her, and she got her recent memories back thanks to SHIELD, the newly-coined  _Natasha_ remembered how destructive  _family_ was.

She swore to herself that she would never be as lost and destroyed by  _family_ as Drakov was, or even the young Natasha Drakov, who had died because of her family.

Natasha swore to herself that she would never consider anyone family, not even those who had saved her.

That didn't stop them from trying.

Clint was the first to slide past Natasha's walls. She barely noticed until it was too late.

It started when he found her, bloody and exhausted and sick of the Red Room's ideas, something heavy weighing on her mind. (It was Natasha Drakov's death, but she didn't know that until later, when SHIELD gave her back her own memories back.) He talked to her. He didn't fight her, he didn't force her, he  _talked_ to her.

And he was the first one she smiled at, a true smile. That was him sliding past, Natasha's barriers trying to stand up to him and his kind words.

* * *

 

But Natasha  _let him in_ , even after she had sworn not to, a week after SHIELD captured her. She was still confined to her cell, although it was fairly nice. There was nothing sharp, but lots of soft things. The bed was comfortable, and they had even provided her with all of the information they had on the Red Room so she could understand what had been done to her. Every day, a psychologist came to her, to "do a mental assessment". Natasha knew she wasn't perfectly mentally healthy, but she wasn't insane. She hadn't killed anyone (yet), and she was under constant lock and key, willingly. What other evidence could they want? She had also signed a contract with SHIELD, saying that she would be willing to work with them as soon as they deemed her field ready.

SHIELD was just being careful, and Natasha couldn't blame them. They had every right to be afraid and wary of her. From the files she could see, they had only identified about thirty kills as being hers. Even though Natasha only had clear memories back to her last trip in cryo, she still had the ever-present list of names and missions that cycled through her head, as well as full memories of those missions where she had learnt a new skill that HYDRA had thought would be useful. Because of those names, she could almost positively know that she had ninety kills, most of which were misattributed to other assassins, and at least fifty sabotages, as well as about one hundred and ten reconnaissance missions, and precisely thirteen toppled governments. As well as that, there were forty other mission names she couldn't accurately define.

Natasha decided SHIELD would probably be more comfortable if she didn't tell them that.

They would also probably be much more comfortable if they didn't know that one of her "diplomatic" missions was to orchestrate the Vietnam War when she was about fourteen.

Of course, she had also helped to end it many years later, whispering ideas and plans into influential members of the governments, confusing troops and spreading rumours and classified information. Technically, the Vietnam War was one of the missions she started assisting other HYDRA Agents with before she graduated, and later a mission where she played the main role in bringing to an end.

They didn't need to know about that.

Based on the titbits of information that her guards didn't even know they were giving her, she had at least another two months in the cells before she would be released out onto the rest of the base, on probation.

She was patient, but that was going to be a long time.

Natasha had thought she was prepared for anything, but she really didn't expect Clint to come running up to her cell. He had visited her as often as possible, at least once every two days. She rarely spoke to him, constantly aware of her oath not to let anyone in. He never stopped coming.

But this time was different. Her guards had gone to investigate a large crash just around the corner, when Clint came sprinting from the direct they had gone. He was carrying the key card that the senior guard had been wearing.

"We have a mission, Tasha!"

Natasha scowled. She had told him not to call her that, and those had been the only words she had spoken to him since she was put in the cell. Naturally, he had taken it as an encouragement.

Still, she stood, heart racing at the thought of finally getting out. She walked calmly into her bathroom, making sure the security camera still had paper over it. It hadn't been a massive challenge for her to draw a rough interpretation of her cell on a piece of paper and put it over the camera. Whoever was watching would just see her an empty, spartan bathroom.

It wasn't that she wasn't willing to have them watching her, it was just that she was wary of  _everyone._ They had other cameras in the cell, but she had wanted one place where she was unwatched.

Rifling around behind the toilet cistern, she pulled out a disassembled gun. Calmly, she assembled it, the parts clicking together faster than anyone in SHIELD could have moved. As she worked, an image flashed in front of her eyes.

_Red hair tangled over her face as she frantically assembled the pistol parts she had been handed. Something was wrong. She didn't have one of the parts she needed. At the front of the room, and instructor paced, gun grasped loosely. They had been promised that whoever was last to assemble their gun would be shot. Natalia looked quickly at the blonde-haired girl working to the left. He gun was missing a different piece, although the girl hadn't worked it out yet._

_That meant…_

_Natalia lunged, crashing into the other, larger, girl. She smashed her half assembled gun against the girl's face, blood pouring from the bridge of the blonde's nose. Quickly, Natalia snatched up the piece she was missing, leaving the blonde unconscious with a half-assembled gun missing two parts._

_Natalia hurried to complete her pistol, red slick blood dripping from it as she slid the pieces together. When she held it up in the air, the first to finish, the blood dripped from the gun and onto her face._

_Natalia didn't flinch._

Decades later, Natasha did. She flinched, then wiped the non-existent blood from her face. In her hands, the gun was perfectly assembled, down to the cartridges now sitting in the pocket she had cut into her jumpsuit.

She sighed. The flashbacks had become less and less frequent since they had started, when SHIELD had put her into the machine that de-programmed her a week ago. She had had three excruciating sessions on it, and now the code words that had been forced into her had no effect. All the things HYDRA had engraved into her being were gone, and she had started to find herself, starting with memories of training HYDRA had allowed her to keep, but that she had suppressed, and the more recent memories that went back to her last brain-washing.

Still, at least this flashback had only taken a few seconds. She could still hear Clint cursing at the scanner for reading the key card too slowly. The first flashback had lasted excruciating minutes.

Natasha walked back into the main part of the cell, watching as Clint's hands slipped from the scanner at the sight of her gun. They were separated by a wall of bulletproof glass, but she shouldn't have had a gun.

"How did you get  _that?_ " He asked.

She smiled. "You armed the psychologist, but she didn't notice when I lifted the weapon."

Clint's jaw dropped. "It was under three layers of clothing! And alarmed!"

Natasha shrugged.

She had expected him to be surprised at how easily she had stolen a gun in one of the most secure facilities in the world, and he was. She had also expected him to be afraid, but he wasn't.

He looked almost… overjoyed?

He looked pleased that she had managed to steal a weapon, and slightly in awe.

Still, something seemed wrong.

"What's the mission?" she queried.

"A warlord in Uganda."

"For both of us?"

He hesitated. "Yes." Natasha read it differently. The answer was  _no._ She wasn't meant to be taking this mission, and Clint wasn't meant to be outside her cell.

It was confirmed when alarms started blaring. Clint's key card let out a beep and disintegrated in his hand. He cursed, and Natasha smiled. Of course SHIELD would be able to self-destruct their key cards.

Natasha gestured Clint away from the door, and he bemusedly moved.

She quickly examined the door frame. It was made of steel and concrete, and SHIELD didn't skimp on anything. It would have been impossible for any normal prisoner to break.

But Natasha had been trained in the Red Room, and she had a serum running through her veins.

As well as that, she was made of steel and marble.

And she had been quietly filing away the hinges whenever her guards turned away. She didn't want to escape particularly, but she did want to remind SHIELD who they were looking after. Her plan had been to break out and report to Fury in a week, just to prove she could, but now it had changed.

Still, it would be hard. In the original plan, the hinges would have been filed down a lot more.

Natasha leapt at the door, one foot colliding directly with the top hinge. Something cracked, and a pain lanced up her leg, but she dropped down as gracefully as she could and took a few steps back. Alarms kept blaring, so she ignored it with the pain.

She leapt again, the same foot in the same place. Something cracked, again, and then the door hinge snapped and she was outside the cell for the first time in a week.

Natasha landed on the floor in a crouch, and stayed there for a second before her ankle twisted and she sprawled sideways.

"Fuck, I broke my ankle," she grunted.

Clint was staring at her.

"How?" He trailed off.

" _Himmeldonnerwetter_ , I've been filing down the hinges since I got here. Also your doors are made of steel and concrete, and bulletproof glass.  _Merde_!" The last word exploded from her mouth as she tried to stand and almost collapsed, again.

Natasha finally righted herself, just as the first armed men and women rushed around the corner, covered in enough armour and holding enough weaponry to be a SWAT team.

She cursed again. " _Marbhfháisc ort_!" Clint stared at her bemusedly.

She started hobbling towards the SHIELD agents, only stopping to swear at them again. " _Kisama_!"

She couldn't injure them badly, or she would be shot when she came back to SHIELD, which she intended on doing, so she dropped the gun.

She pushed the pain away, forcing herself to run normally towards the agents. Memories of similar exercises in the Red Room flooded her mind, and for once she welcomed them, recalling how to force the pain away.

She slammed into the first agent, quickly spinning out of the gunfire of the second one. She punched the first agent in the jaw, quickly calculating how much force to use so he would only wake up with a bad headache, and nothing more. She did the same with the agent that was shooting at her, a tall dark-haired woman. Soon, she was a blur of motion sliding around the corridor, taking out agents at a bewildering pace.

Eventually she stopped, the pain in her ankle finally getting to her. " _Sooka!"_ she spat at the lone remaining agent.

Natasha fell to the ground, black consuming her vision. She managed to see Clint hitting the last agent over the head with a "Sorry, Wilson!" before she passed out.

Natasha woke to a mild pain in her ankle that she ignored. It would heal soon. She opened her eyes to see Clint bending over her ankle, a needle lying empty beside him and bandages in his hands. He had bandaged her ankle, and shot her with a painkiller.

He turned to her in awe. "You just took out the elite SHIELD squad, one on twenty five-"  
_was that how many there had been?_ She couldn't remember.

"-with a broken ankle."

Natasha snorted. "I've done more."

He didn't disagree. "Try not to move. The painkiller will take a little bit to work."

She grunted. Her sped-up metabolism meant it was already working, but it would probably stop feeling better soon. Clint lifted her up and swung her easily into his arms, before pulling a panel in the ceiling out, exposing the vents. He quickly boosted her up, and Natasha rolled over, ready to crawl through the ceiling vents. She noticed he had tucked her gun back into her pocket.

Clint followed her, pulling the panel up behind him. He turned to see her already a few meters away. "Stop, Tasha! The painkillers won't work if you do that!"

Natasha turned a withering eye on him. "I have an increased metabolism. The painkillers will be gone in a few minutes anyway. Hurry up."

Clint shrugged, and followed, pausing to call out directions every couple minutes. Natasha didn't ask how he knew his way so well, seeing as they were in the vents in the roof.

It took only ten minutes before the pain was back. Natasha kept going, letting out a steady stream of curses every so often. She could just grit her teeth and move on in silence, but swearing helped her deal with the pain. It was also the exact opposite of how her trainers had taught her to move ( _silently, quietly_ the past whispered), and she took a harsh joy from that. The languages she had learned on missions, and the missions she remembered because she learned languages during them, were burnt into her mind. If she chose to use the less than savoury terms, that was her choice. Hers alone. She liked the freedom, liked claiming something for herself.

So it became part of Natasha.

After a particularly long run of insults and expletives from Natasha, Clint started chuckling.

"You know," he said, "I really should have expected this. It's impressive, actually. Seven languages I speak, five I recognise, and about fifteen that I don't even recognise."

Natasha snorted again. "Which ones do you speak?"

"Russian, German, French, Japanese, Mandarin, English, and Italian."

"And what ones do you recognise?"

"Indonesian, Latin, Cantonese, Greek and, umm… Turkish"

Natasha nodded. It was a pretty impressive list of languages that he could speak and recognise.

"What are the others?" Clint asked.

"Not telling."

"Hey!"

It was a that moment that she realised the warm feeling spreading through her may not have been just a side effect of the pain killers. He had wormed his way through her walls. She didn't trust him completely, unconditionally, not yet, but it could happen.

A few months later, she cried with him, a tangled sobbing mess of emotion over an innocent girl who had been killed in a hostage situation.

It was then that she considered him family. She trusted him, completely, unconditionally, and irrevocably. He wasn't like her brother, or a cousin, but something more. Part of her. Maybe a twin.

* * *

The next person who became her family was Coulson.

She guessed it happened after they returned from that first fateful mission. It was successful, but anything could have happened when they walked through the main doors of SHIELD's base.

The room went quiet.

Absolute, dead, silence.

Clint shifted uncomfortably, but Natasha stood, sending death glares around the room. She didn't smile, didn't frown. She was a statue.

A man stood in the back. Coulson, Clint's mentor. He beckoned them over, then lead them to his office.

Clint sat on the chair like a puppy about to be scolded. Natasha couldn't help but feel the same.

They sat there in dead silence, until Coulson sighed.

"I'm glad you made it back."

_Of course he was_ , Natasha thought.  _Clint's practically his son._

"Both of you."

_Oh._

_That's new._

It was the first time someone had actually expressed relief that she had made it back. It was unfamiliar.

Natasha felt for sure that they were going to get a dressing down, but the man just sighed, and smiled. Not a Clint. At both of them.

Coulson stood and grabbed a first aid box from one of the cupboards behind his desk. He moved around the desk and Natasha stiffened. Clint was the only person who had touched her in a long time, without it being for a mission or training, first when he had fixed up her ankle at the start of the mission and then throughout the mission.

Coulson patched up Clint first, bandaging his many scrapes and cuts.

Then he turned to Natasha, and she froze.

He quickly examined her injuries, then nodded. He handed her bandages and a disinfectant cream. "Let me know if there is anything you can't reach."

Natasha gaped at him. He wasn't pushing her. He was just… letting her be her. He cared, but he didn't want to force her to do anything.

She took the first aid supplies, and started to patch herself up. While she did so, Clint and Coulson talked.

His first name was Phil, she discovered. He was letting them patch themselves up because he knew Clint hated the medical bay, and he assumed Natasha would too.

She had a scrape on her back which she couldn't reach because of her dislocated shoulder. She had popped the shoulder back in place, but it was still excruciating to reach around and she didn't want to risk damaging the tissue and tendons too much.

Clint had sprained his wrist, so he wouldn't be able to help her without damaging himself.

That left her with one option.

Natasha shrugged her shirt off. Clint turned red faced immediately –  _silly boy. He's seen me in less, although it has always been a necessity before_ – but Coulson just turned to her.

"That cut looks bad, Romanoff."

"Could I have a hand cleaning it up?" Her voice was level and even, leaving no room for interpretation. She wanted help, just help, and no more.

Coulson looked shocked for a moment, before nodding. He honestly hadn't expected her to ask for help.

He cleaned the wound quickly and efficiently, sterilizing it and bandaging it rapidly. His fingers barely brushed Natasha's skin.

That was when he started to become part of her family. He was respecting her boundaries, not forcing her. Again. It seemed like this was going to become a habit of his.

He became part of what she was beginning to recognise as her bruised and broken family when he showed them out the door. "I'll tell Fury you're back, although I suspect he already knows. For now, sleep. I will soften him up for you if possible, but you need rest if you are going to survive Fury's anger."

No one had ever tried to alleviate her punishment before, except for Clint. It was, once again, novel. He cared, even though he didn't have to.

If Clint was her twin, Phil Coulson was fast becoming the stern older brother, who looked out for them, and was strict, but who still joked with them.

* * *

 

Eventually, Fury became an uncle. Strict but loud and sometimes rude, who still cared for them as they cared for him.

* * *

 

The Avengers slowly added themselves to her motley family.

Tony was the cool and smart little brother, the one who gives the puppy eyes but you still want to slap over the head.

Steve was like a slightly older brother, strong, dependable and constant. Natasha didn't always know where she stood with him – did he want to be friends or more? – but she decided it didn't matter. Whatever happened, he would always be family, just like what had happened with Clint.

Vision was a distant cousin, one she would never quite trust but who she would accept and take into her little family all the same. She would watch out for him, for he was dangerous, but he would still be family.

Rhodey was like a sibling's best friend, the one she sided with to keep Tony under control, who she would trust and welcome into what had become quite a large family.

Sam Wilson was another sibling's friend. He was the one who quickly became part of the family, the one who knew all the inside jokes and knew everyone, but who sided with his friend in every family debate.

Wanda was Natasha's little sister, the one she laughed and joked with, the one she had girl-talk with, the one who she held through her heartbreak and young love. Wanda was the little sister who always had her back, and if they fought, they never aimed to hurt each other.

Thor was the laughing cousin, the one who everyone trusted, but no one knew that well. Natasha accepted him into her family without question. He didn't lie like his brother did.

Bruce was, to Natasha, an older brother. He was the calm and collected one, the one who you could trust with everything – even when he got angry. She was scared of him sometimes, but it wasn't his fault. As with Steve, sometimes she wasn't sure where she stood with him. As with Steve, she assumed that all would be well. Lover or friend, he would always be part of her disconnected and sometimes radically different family.

* * *

 

Then, her family tore itself apart.

And she realized anew why she had sworn to never become someone's family. She was being pulled on all sides, torn apart. Little brother or big brother? Tony or Steve?

In the end, she chose what she believed was right.

Tony was right about the Accords, in her mind.

But Steve was right about Bucky. He was brainwashed and could be saved, like she had been.

So she swapped sides.

Her family tore itself apart.

Her family tore her apart.

So she stood for herself. She did what  _she_ believed was right. She did her best to stop herself from ripping and tearing at the seams, at the scars that held her together.

In the end, they would come back together.

Natasha knew that.

She just hoped it wouldn't tear each person apart to put the family back together.

And she never wanted it to be a war that brought them back together, finally.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it isn't clear, I'm going to be going with past Clintasha - they were together romantically, once, when they were the only people they could trust in whatever country they were in, and became two people who knew each other, totally. Mind, body, opinion, emotions... They know each other absolutely, but it was a twisted path.
> 
> Then Clint met Laura, and they realized that what he had with Tasha had was more than family, more than a romantic or sexual relationship. They are part of each other. Where one goes, the other knows and follows.
> 
> As for the modern relationship, I can't decide between Cap or Bruce, so it'll probably be a little ambiguous.


	7. G for Gamble and Game (it all was, once)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How did they decide that Clint and Nat would work together perfectly? And how did SHIELD realize exactly how dangerous the Black Widow was?  
> How did Clint and the Widow, before Natasha was recreated, interact?

For the Black Widow, it was all a game. Every mission she took, every life that she presented to death, every heart that she stole and ripped to shreds… it was all simply a gamble that she took, a gamble where the odds where screwed in her favour.

To the Widow, going to SHIELD was little more than another move in the game that others were blind to. The currency was stolen lives, and strength. The Black Widow had plenty of both. SHIELD was a gamble. She might decide to tear it to pieces, a cat playing with its short-lasting toy. She might decide to tear HYDRA down. She had been out of cryro for a long time. Almost a decade had gone by when she met Clint. HYDRA no longer mattered, past being a stepping stone in the hopscotch game that the Widow was playing.

She cast her die, weighed her options, and chose to follow SHIELD and Clint for as long as she felt like.

In the end, it didn’t matter. She would go on.

She always won the game, no matter how risky a gamble she took.

* * *

 

Of course, it took SHIELD longer than it should have to realize that. The Widow made a bloody mental strike next to their name. Three strikes, and they were out.

Then, grudgingly, she removed it. It had taken her longer than it should have to notice that they didn’t know how dangerous she was. In truth, she was reeling from the conversation she had had with the archer who had brought her in.

Clint Francis Barton.

He had managed to confuse her game like no one had before.

The Widow lost herself in the memory of the conversation.

_“Hey, what’s your name?”_

_“I am HYDRA’s. I am the Black Widow. I am subject 42. I used to be Natalia.”_

_“Are you Natalia now?”_

_“No.”_

_“Who are you then?”_

She hadn’t been able to answer, but it didn’t matter. She was here now, back in the game, and she would win. The Black Widow dragged her thoughts back to the situation she was in.

When they had arrived at the SHIELD headquarters, somewhere north-north west of Vegas – they had taken lots of turns and twists, and she had been voluntary blindfolded for most of it (to make the game more fun), but they couldn’t throw off her sense of direction that easily. Besides, she could still smell Vegas on her ragged clothing – a group of thirty fully armed guards had fallen into formation around her and the archer Barton.

They must have been walking through the sterile environment of the headquarters for half an hour now, and she was getting bored. Again, they were trying to throw off her sense of direction, which was stupid, as she now had a fully internalized map of everywhere they had taken her. They were giving her too much information in this stage of the game.

Even with all that, she was still bored.

So, so bored.

Nobody had tried to kill her for at least twelve hours.

Even when she was at the HYDRA base, there was never a period this long when she was not attacked. If there was, it normally meant they were planning an ambush.

The guards surrounding her and Barton where starting to look a little bored themselves. They clearly hadn’t been told exactly who they were escorting, or why they should be terrified.

The Widow estimated that it would take her about thirty seconds to kill them all, if she snatched a gun.

It would take about four minutes if she didn’t pick up a single weapon.

It would take her ten minutes if she didn’t kill them, just severely injured them or knocked them out.

That, she decided, would be the best option. After all, she wasn’t looking to topple SHIELD yet; she just wanted some fun, something to stop her from being bored.

Her moment came when they led her into a small room. It wasn’t too small; in fact, it was larger than most interrogation rooms she had worked in, but much, much smaller than any self-respecting secret organisation’s office. It was, she decided, a waiting room. They would hold her there until she broke.

Ha. As if.

The Black Widow _couldn’t_ break. HYDRA had tried, and each time, Natalia, the Asset, and the Black Widow had remade themselves, forging themselves from marble and steel and bullets and loss.

One of the guards, moving with the easy gait of the self-assured, checked her handcuffs. They were perfectly intact.

They could be snapped in a few seconds, or she could dislocate her wrists and escape in half a second. They posed no real threat.

The agent leered at her, and she could practically read his mind. Her, ripped clothing, and handcuffs?

She was used to dealing with such filthy creatures.

The Black Widow smiled, sweet and beguiling. _Smile number two._

The agent grinned. He leaned in to whisper into her ear, and Natasha followed his dilated pupils with bored eyes. As he leaned closer, she tensed her head, ready to whip around and head but him unconscious.

She never made it.

The archer’s hand yanked the agent’s head backwards, just saving him from the Widow’s bloodstained red locks.

The stupid agent shrieked as he tumbled backwards. He swore at Barton. “What are you doing, mate? I wasn’t doing anything to her!!!”

Clint smiled wryly. “It wasn’t about what you were doing to her, Tompson. It was about what she was going to do to you.”

The agent, Tompson, looked surprised, but stupidly decided to blunder on. Typical idiotic male, he didn’t even think about what Clint could have meant. “I reckon I woulda liked whatever she was going to do to me!”

Clint sighed a long suffering sigh as one of the other agents pulled Tompson back. The Widow watched curiously. Perhaps she had been wrong to lump most males in with this particularly irritating and stupid specimen.

Clint turned to her, sharp sniper’s eyes fixing her in their sights. “Widow, what were you going to do to him?”

Ah. He was going to make them understand who she was. The Widow grinned smile seventy-two, wild and malicious. It was strange, having someone help her show other people what she could do. Normally she was all alone.

It felt strange, and she wasn’t sure if she liked it or not.

“Can I just show them?”

“Fine. I’m going to do paperwork.” Clint removed himself immediately from the scene. He had seen her in action before. Tompson sniggered. “Paperwork, Barton? Are you trying to impress the lady by doing something you would never normally do?”

Barton eyed him dryly. “No. I’m trying not to get injured.” He looked down at the paperwork he had spread out on the floor, and slid down to sit on the ground beside it. “Have fun, Widow, but please stay here. Don’t beat them around too much.” He then glued his eyes to the paper.

The Widow boiled. He was intentionally ignoring her! This wasn’t how the game was supposed to go. She was meant to obliterate everyone, leave the survivors staring at her in fear and awe. He didn’t though.

Somehow, she had lost this gamble.

But the rest of the game was still there to win.

The Widow launched herself at the first man, the idiotic Tompson. She dislocated her wrists as she was leaping, leaving the metal handcuffs to clink together and drop to the ground as she twisted in the air, a deadly ballerina. Tompson went down with a blow to the temple. She had hit him hard enough to give him a severe headache when he woke, but he would live. She would be more merciful with the others.

The Widow swirled between two more agents who had started to run at her. She swung an arm around one, and pushed her closer to the other. They hit each other and collapsed. The Black Widow took another glance around, then dove for one of the legs of the four agents running at her, shocked expressions lingering on their faces. Dislocating the man’s hipbone, she swung him at the other three agents. They fell like dominoes.

A carefully placed right hook, and another was down. Left swing. A woman collapsed, hand held to her bloody ear. The Widow smirked. Concussion. Three weeks recovery. A well placed kick to an uncomfortable spot, and another man fell.

Ten bodies littered the floor. The remaining twenty agents circled her warily. She noticed that two of them had tranquilizing guns out. Obviously, they had been told not to harm her.

The Widow pouted. She hated tranqs. They always made it hard to move, and she detested feeling sluggish. If they shot her with more than three, she would fall.

Barton still hadn’t looked up, focused on his paperwork. He was steadily ignoring the cries of pain that came from the agents. In his mind, the Widow would have exploded at one point or another. She needed entertainment. Any fool would have been able to see the slight cant of one eyebrow when she entered the room that meant destruction, and he wasn’t going to stand in her way.

God, he was terrified of that woman, but he knew her. She wouldn’t kill them, just… hurt them. A lot.

Tompson deserved it.

And Fury probably wouldn’t mind.

Coulson wouldn’t care. He had been nagging Clint to do his paper work for weeks now.

When Clint looked back up, The Widow was engaged in some sort of martial arts, using the agents as props in a painful gymnastics course. He did a quick count. Five left.

She glanced up, feeling eyes on her, and he looked down. Not that he would ever tell her that, but he had always planned on letting Fury see exactly why they couldn’t let her go.

Of course, Fury would try to persuade him to kill her, but Clint wasn’t going to do that. He remembered the shattered look in her eyes when he had asked who she was.

All the answers had been terrible, like she had stabbed one of his arrows through his chest, slowly and excruciatingly.

In the end, he had stuck with calling her Black Widow. Every time he did that, he could almost see the respect held in her facial features go up. It seemed like people hardly ever respected her wishes. He felt sick to the stomach at that. What type of people had she been trained by? She was more weapon, tool, _toy_ than human.

Eventually, she was down to the last, a promising female agent called Hill. The back door creaked open, and Fury walked through. He had his eye on a tablet held in front of him, but looked up when he registered the heavy thump of flesh on Kevlar armour.

“Agent Barton!” The voice cracked through the air. “What is _this?”_

“The Black Widow was getting bored, Sir. Plus, I thought you wanted to see what she could do!”

“Barton…”

They were silent while they watched the two women fighting in the centre of a mound of strewn bodies.

“Barton, you just wasted the cream of the crop. These were all my best agents!”

“They aren’t dead.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I asked her not to kill them. Also, if she wanted them dead, it would have been over much, much faster. She hasn’t even touched a gun yet.”

Fury grunted. He trusted Barton’s judgment, woe befall him.

The Black Widow launched herself off the ground, wrapping her legs around Hill’s neck. They crashed to the ground immediately, and there was a brief struggle before Hill stilled.

The Widow stood, turning to the two men. She had heard their conversation, and she only had one problem with it.

“These are your best agents?” Clint stared at her in bemusement. He knew she had spoken in a Chinese dialect, but he wasn’t sure if it was Cantonese or Mandarin.

Fury, however, replied. “No, these are my rookies. Of fucking course these are my best agents! Who else did you think we would send to guard you?” Clint struggled to translate in his head. He could have sworn Director Fury had started his rant in the same Chinese language but ended in something he recognised as German.

The Widow shot back a response, in Russian. “Cannon fodder, perhaps. Oh well. They were entertaining, for a short while.”

The Director blanched. He turned to Clint, speaking in English for once. “I thought you said she didn’t kill them!”

Clint turned white.

The Widow broke in, speaking in a perfect Texan accent. “I didn’t.”

Clint smiled, colour returning to his face.

Then she smiled, and the Director took a step backwards. That smile alone could have killed everyone in the building and still have had enough venom to rival a rattlesnake.

“But I’m still bored...”

Clint rose to his feet. This, he could deal with.

Fury clapped him on the shoulder, pushing him forward. The agents he saw scattered through the room had all surpassed Barton in basic training. If they had all fallen, Barton didn’t technically stand a chance, but he seemed to be confident. Perhaps he thought she would have mercy on him. Judging by the smile that split the Widow’s face, that was unlikely. If anything, he was in for a rougher end than most of the agents on the ground.

Fury felt a grim smile grace his face. If Barton was beaten, he wouldn’t be able to protest that the Widow could be allowed to live. As well as that, Fury really just wanted to feel a petty sense of revenge when Barton hit the floor. The man had cost him thirty top agents!

“Are you bored, Black Widow?”

“Yes. Entertain me.”

“As you wish.”

The SHIELD agent squared up against the HYDRA agent, and he couldn’t help but think back to the time, barely ten hours ago, when he had found her in an alleyway in London. Back then, she had been new to him. After that, they had had a long plane trip to talk.

Now, he knew her.

Problem was, she knew him too.

Later, when Fury was reviewing the fight filmed by a security camera on the wall, he would realise that the Widow had dodged before Barton had even started running.

The archer flew past the assassin, but spun around before he was a metre away. They locked eyes, waiting for the hint of movement.

All of a sudden, they were a blur of motion. The Widow flew at Clint, fists hammering at where his head had once been – he had ducked as soon as he saw a flicker of motion in her eyes. She growled in frustration. Even her fellow students in the Red Room had never been able to read her as well as he did.

Then they were circling, eyes trained on each other again.

A crowd had gathered, hearing the commotion. Neither of them noticed.

All of a sudden, the time to tempt the other into an early mistake was gone. They became a machine, perfectly in sync with each other. Every time one of them launched a blow, it was dodged or blocked perfectly by the other, no matter how fast the motion had been. They were locked in a deadly battle, trying to take the other down.

The growing crowd peered through the small windows, barely able to make out the black blurs that fought each other back and forth across the room.

A hush had fallen inside the room, only broken by the harsh pant of the two opponent’s breath and the heavy blows that sunk into blocks or whistled into empty air.

They had turned into a perfect mechanical wonder piece, held together by the raw emotion that hung in the air. There was anger in the right hook the Widow threw at Clint, and there was a sense of satisfaction that permeated Clint’s evasion. The Widow snarled, and from the corner Fury felt a chill creep down his spine.

The Black Widow hadn’t wanted to kill the other agents, so they were alive. Some of them were waking and dragging themselves away from the fight.

But at that moment, there was nothing the Widow wanted more than to kill Barton. How _dare_ he steal her from her perfect game? How come he was allowed to change the value she placed on her gambles?

He was destroying the perfect empire of facts and lies she had built in her mind, and she hated it. Hated him. Hated everything. She knew, somewhere in her twisted brain, that this was irrational. But adrenaline was rushing, pouring through her veins and she had never had to hold her anger in before. She had never really even had _anger._ It was so new.

She landed a punch, and Clint slid backwards a few metres. The agents that had woken pulled their colleagues out of the way.

Clint wanted, for the first time, to _kill_ the Black Widow. She was disrupting the world he had built for himself in SHIELD, and it had been his choice to spare her. She had to make it difficult. (Deep inside, he knew that they had spared each other. But that didn’t matter.)

All that mattered was the scent of their sweat in the air, the steady back and forth shuffle as they tried to beat the ever-loving soul out of each other.

It morphed into a dance, a ferocious ballet of punches and kicks.

“I’ll never be able to go back to Russia now,” the Widow snarled, landing a kick on Barton’s shin.

“Did you want to?”

As she blocked his punch, the Widow considered. No, she didn’t. She much preferred the game she could play with him. She would take this gamble, and if he changed the odds, then so be it. She would win, anyway, with him by her side.

“No.”

Clint smiled, then caught her next kick, lifting her leg up. Instead of pulling free as he had expected, the Widow was suddenly pushing off, skyrocketing from his hands. She spun as she plummeted back down to him, and he realized too late that he should have moved.

He caught her bridal style, her legs draped over one of his arms and her arms around his neck.

Yes, her arms were around his neck, and they were tightening. Clint gasped as he started to run out of oxygen. He choked out a final sentence before his knees buckled and he pitched forward.

“You are going to screw up my life here. I know it.”

She was underneath him, green eyes glaring into his grey ones.

“Yes. Yes, I am.” There was so much satisfaction in her voice that he honestly, truly, despised her for a moment. It faded when she asked her next question.

“But would you have it any other way?”

The answer was no, and he tapped that out in Morse code against her strangling arm.

She relinquished her grip, and rose to her feet, pushing his limp body off her.

Her green eyes smiled the first true and pleasant smile he had seen on her face. She offered him a hand, and he clasped it, pulling himself up. They had sorted out all their differences, but the adrenaline that had forced this burning anger into their bloodstream still pumped in their hearts.

The Widow winked. “Are you any good with that bow?”

Belatedly, Clint realised his bow was slung in the corner and his quiver was on his shoulder.

“What are you suggesting?” he asked her.

“Let us spar. No mercy, no quarter. Just… let us find one another.”

He understood what she meant. He had never felt quite so whole as he did in that moment, filled with the knowledge that they would beat each other up to kingdom come, but they knew each other now, completely and truly.

Clint had never really sparred without knowing he could call an end to it any time he wanted.

Still, he realized, he trusted her. It was foreign. In the entire SHIELD agency, there were probably only two people he would trust completely. With his life? He would trust anyone with his life. But with his secrets, his very being? Only Coulson, and now the Widow.

So he grabbed his bow, unable to stop a slight smirk that crossed his face. _Any good?_ She was about to find out just how good.

The Widow paused by the far wall and raised her arms in welcome. _No mercy._ Clint smiled, and behind him, Fury shuddered. He had only seen the affable side of Clint before. This side was ferocious and animalistic and raw. And the Widow? She was beyond anything that he had expected, and Clint was really the only one who could just hold her. Whatever pact they had made in the centre of the room was going to play out, and he was suddenly terrified for the two of them.

Clint let loose a volley of five arrows, all in different places. The Widow dodged four, and snatched the fifth out of the air. She nodded at him, and anyone else would have seen that as a challenge. Clint didn’t. She was recognising him, his arrows, his passion.

And then, faster than any human, she sent his arrow whistling back to him. He yelped, and raised his bow. The arrow deflected off it, slamming into the wall to the right of Director Fury, who’s eyes widened almost comically. He had superb reflexes, and even he hadn’t managed to see that coming. Clint had only known to raise his bow in defence because of a slight flicker in the Widow’s emerald eyes.

Then the Black Widow beckoned Hawkeye forward, and he went.

They charged towards each other, and another fist fight followed, of punches that would never be softened and kicks that aimed for the other’s weakest spots. They knew each other, entirely, completely.

Again, it morphed into a dance. But this time, the dance wasn’t deadly. Instead, they were throwing each other across the room, swinging around each other, trying tricks and moves they never would have trusted another person to catch on to. The Widow was pirouetting like she hadn’t since she was Natalia, spinning and leaping like the ballerina she had never really been. And Clint? Clint was another phantom of the breeze, flowing from position and position, always there to catch her, to lift her up.

Outside, the majority of SHIELD watched with wide eyes.

In that single training session, STRIKE team Delta was born.

The fight, if it could be called that anymore, ended with the two of them sprawled out on the floor, breathing heavily, arms around each other’s shoulders.

* * *

 

It was a few days later, when her mind was cleared of the most recent HYDRA brain wipe that she realised it wasn’t a game anymore.

She was Natasha, and she cared too much to gamble with Clint’s life.

She didn’t want to play a game where the currency was deaths and lies.

But when she was the Black Widow, she had had no fear of playing that game.

Clint had changed it all.


	8. H for Handcuffs (a twisted idea of home)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Handcuffs and Natasha, and how she fights what the Red Room has instilled in her, with Clint's help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it's been a while. Umm. Sorry about that. Don't expect a regular updating schedule. I'm still a mess, and I have an ever-growing NaNoWriMo novel that is currently the loudest and hungriest chick in the nest of all my works in progress. Half of this was written months ago, and the other half was written today. Unbetaed and only partially edited, sorry. It's short. Again, sorry. Life's been a bit of a mess, and my motivation went down the drain with very little fight.

When Natalia was a young child, the only thing that was clasped around her fragile wrists was her parent's gentle, helping hands, and occasionally, a swaddling blanket to keep her safe.

* * *

When Natalia was young, in the Red Room, there was always something around her wrists,  _to keep her safe_. Safe. What a foreign word. Her wrists looked just a fragile as they had always been, but they grew stronger as she grew older, until she could hurt as much as be hurt.

When she went to sleep in the Red Room, there was always a circlet of metal that held her wrists.

Handcuffs.

_To keep you safe_ , they all said.

It was hard to believe that, but believe it she did. After all, the nightmares weren't as bad as the horrors that she saw throughout the day, weren't as bad as the horrors she committed.

She grew.

The nightmares went as she grew older, as the Red Room made sure she understood that what she was doing was  _good_ , not  _bad._ Natalia understood.

She grew stronger, older, harsher, crueller.

The handcuffs stayed, the one thing that meant  _home_ as trainers and classmates and routines changed. They tethered her to her very existence as she grew. They were the one thing that remained the same.

Those handcuffs were the only ones she never tried to break out of. After all, they were there to keep her  _safe_.

Later, she wondered if  _safe_  and  _ours_  had the same meaning to Hydra.

* * *

The Black Widow still kept the handcuffs around her wrists. However, they were only there when she was asleep in a safehouse, or at the Hydra camp. They were  _not_  for missions.  
The Red Room had told them stories about girls who had worn handcuffs to make them safe while on missions, to keep them  _safe_. It never worked. The lesson:  _you are never safe on missions. You are only safe here. Handcuffs and safety belong to us, just like you._

Natalia was a good student, and the Black Widow was a perfect one.

The product of meagre food rations and extreme exercise and training, the Black Widow was all ribs and bones and stronger-than-they-appear muscles that formed curves. The serum that pulsed through the steel in her blood and coexisted with the marble in her bones made her the stereotypical beauty, and she had learnt the arts of flirtation and make up just as well as she had learnt the arts of hand-to-hand combat and assassination. She excelled at them all equally.

The Black Widow was Hydra's favourite operative for 'honeypot' missions; missions that involved seduction for information, or assassination. The Winter Soldier wasn't exactly as appealing as she was, although he had taken part in several honeypot missions before they replaced his arm.

On those honeypot missions, she wore other strips of metal around her wrists. Delicate bracelets of gold and silver, dotted with semi-precious gems, they grounded her.  _Handcuffs_ , they whispered.  _Safe_ , they mumbled coldly against her skin.  _Home._  The stones imbedded in them glinted as coldly as her eyes, and under the golden lights, they smiled their lies almost as sweetly.

And so, with the muttered words that echoed coldly against her alabaster skin and shifted alongside the sheer fabric that graced her hard-earnt curves, she stole the lights at every show, if that's what she (and Hydra) wanted.

* * *

When she was taken in by SHIELD, it was different.

She had been out of the cryogenic freezer for almost three decades. Every night since then had been spent on a mission, or at the Hydra headquarters, handcuffs tight.  _Safe. Home._

In the weeks she spent in the holding cell, she didn't have handcuffs.

SHIELD didn't know how much she needed them, how unsettled she felt to try and tell herself "I am safe" without the murmur of the handcuffs.

On the third night without sleep, she gave up on pretending she was safe.

" _Mission_ ," she whispered to herself. "This is a mission."

She didn't need handcuffs on a mission.

But she was never safe.

After Clint broke her out, she was actually on a mission, actually in danger. She was Natasha by then, aware that she had been controlled, brainwashed, manipulated.

The Black Widow had hated the puny businessmen who tried to manipulate her.

Natasha just hated manipulation, unless she was the one doing the manipulating.

So she threw off the need for  _handcuffs_ , for  _safety_ , and did her best to ignore it.

* * *

After they got back to the headquarters and she was put on probation, she didn't last a week.

Each night was sleepless and filled with the blank stares of the dead, and her even blanker staring eyes in the mirror of the past.

She often didn't even dare to try to sleep, instead seeking out the training room and shooting bullet after bullet after bullet after memory after memory, or throwing knife after knife after knife into the ghosts that haunted her.

Her wrists ached with a wish for something that she didn't want to grant them.

On the seventh sleepless night of aching limbs and swirling thoughts, the ~~Black Widow~~ Natasha folded. She strode through the hallways of SHIELD (lesson 3 of spying: Look like you are meant to be there, and nobody will question it), seeking the supply room.

She found it, exactly where she had thought. The wall in front of her flickered with black spots of sleep deprivation as she lifted shining metal handcuffs from a hook on the wall. She didn't bother to check to see if they would be missed. It didn't matter.

She stumbled back to her room, flinching away from the faces staring at her from the shadows, the ghosts of her past.  _"You killed us,_ " they whispered.  _"Murdered. Traitor. Thief of lives_."

Each time she accidentally looked at them, she flinched.

Because there was nothing she could say in return, nothing she could say to dispel the ghosts of her bloody past.

She was everything they were accusing her of.

Murderer.

Traitor.

Thief, of lives and fortunes and futures.

She collapsed into her room, barely able to see through the darkness of sleep trying to crash over her. Natasha barely made it to her bed, clicking one side of the handcuffs over the bar at head of the mattress, and the other over her own wrist.

_Safe,_  it whispered.  _Home. Rest._

Natasha breathed out, and plunged into sleep.

The memories where gone.

She woke partway through the night, cold metal around her wrist remaining silence even as she turned, feigning sleep, to see the intruder.

There was someone bending over her.

Natasha reacted as the Black Widow would have, back with Hydra.

She bolted upright, hand contorting to sleep out of the handcuffs, and reached under her pillow for her gun.

Her gun, which she didn't have.

Her attacker reared back, barely avoiding being headbutted. They fell backwards, slamming into the floor. Natasha balanced over them, one arm against their throat.

"Talk," she said, the dangerous burr to her voice ruined by the yawn that broke free of her mouth.

The person beneath her coughed, and spoke in Clint's voice. "Jeez, Natasha! I just saw you staggering down the hall and came to see what was wrong!"

Natasha relaxed. "I couldn't sleep," she admitted.

Clint eyed the shaking exhaustion in her arms. "You fell asleep in less than a minute. How long has it been since you slept?"

Natasha sighed, to exhausted and unwilling to mislead him. He could do with the information what he willed. "Six or seven days." She moved off Clint, only partly to hide the tremors in her arms.

Clint's eyes went wide, but then he blinked and focused. That was one of the things she liked about him. He was fast on the uptake, and never questioned things unless he needed too.

"Why?"

She didn't answer.

Clint sat upright and grabbed one of her wrists before she could twist away, which was true testament to how tired she was. He smoothed an arrow-roughened finger over the red marks circling Natasha's wrists.

Dark eyes stared at her, holding her eyes and refusing to let her go. "What are these?"

She didn't reply, unwilling to just hand that secret away.

His eyes glanced up to the bedhead, and she cursed him for being so observant.

"Handcuffs?"

Natasha grudgingly told him. "Red Room conditioning. I can't feel safe asleep without them."

Clint tilted his head, amusingly bird-like. "Why don't you wear them on missions?"

"Because missions are never safe. It's only for when I'm safe at headquarters."

Clint didn't choose to focus on how messed up she was, how messed up the Red Room was. Instead, as she'd almost started to anticipate, he focused on the good things. "So you feel safe here?"

Natasha blinked.

She hadn't really thought of it that way. "I suppose. This is my new home base."

Clint grinned.

"Okay. Sleep. Use the handcuffs if you need to. I'll stand guard."

Natasha was too tired to protest. The adrenaline had worn off, and she drifted off to the sound of Clint's even breathing.

* * *

She didn't wake for another twenty hours.

When she did, the handcuffs were gone.

Instead, Clint's calloused hand wrapped around her wrist, a circle of warm flesh, so different to the cold, cutting, metal of the handcuffs.

She didn't feel uncomfortable, or threatened. It wasn't the metal that whispered  _"safe, home_ ", this time. It was the feel of Clint's rough hand and the softness of his breath, eyes closed and leaning up against her bed. His back was to her, his head tilted onto his shoulder.

She couldn't tell if he was asleep.

When she moved, he gave a small gasp and jolted upright, turning to face her. "How are you feeling?"

Her throat was filled with a lump, making it hard to answer.

It was the first time someone had ever done more than they had to to make her comfortable.

* * *

It didn't take many more nights for the handcuffs to stop being  _home_ , and Clint to take their place.

* * *

It was strangely freeing and disconcerting the night she realised that she didn't even need him or the handcuffs anymore, that she was comfortable on her own in her own room and her own little version of home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for bothering to read my words! I love all you guys who have stuck with me through these months of unofficial hiatus. Hopefully the next one won't take as long, but no promises. I have three other stories eager for attention.
> 
> MyNightmaresAreMyDaydreams


End file.
